Monica Graves, 30, had Friday morning off, and a laundry list of things to do before her daughter's 16th birthday party on Saturday.

She needed trash bags to black out the windows at the party venue in Sumiton, decorations her daughter had requested. She also wanted to buy a gift for the girl - a small cross on a necklace.

Before she could tackle anything on her list, Graves had one important errand to run at the Walker County Courthouse. The building stands in the center of Jasper, fronted by a handsome gray facade, fountains and fresh cut flowers.

Graves slipped around to the back - past humming electrical boxes and down a wide concrete alley. A door led to a basement corridor filled with people, most of them women, who started lining up around 7 a.m. Some looked fresh out of high school. Others might have been collecting Social Security. One, fresh from an overnight shift as a nurse, still wore scrubs.

"There are all kind of people here," Graves said as she waved to friends.

Walker County is 90 percent white, and the faces in the benches reflected one of the fastest-growing inmate populations in the state - rural, drug-abusing women.

Between 2002 and 2013, the number of white women in Alabama prisons doubled. An analysis of a recent prison roster revealed that nine out of 10 of the counties most likely to send women to prison have less than 100,000 residents, and most of them are white.

For a couple years, Graves has made this weekly pilgrimage to take a drug test and pay court fees. It's part of an agreement that kept her out of prison on charges of drug possession and third-degree burglary.

When Graves took the deal, she faced a possible life sentence as a habitual offender. Drug charges already sent her to prison for almost three years. Strung out and suicidal, she weighed 98 pounds when she pleaded into the program. At first, she thought it might buy her some time as she devised an escape.

It wouldn't have been the first time she had run, and every attempt seemed to bring her back to where she started.

The beginning

Graves began looking for a way out as a child growing in an abusive and chaotic home. It was dirty and dysfunctional, and she can remember times when the water bill went unpaid, drying the pipes that fed the home.

When she was 14 years old, she thought she found her escape. Graves, a freshman in high school, got pregnant and married in quick succession and moved in with her husband's family. After she gave birth, her doctor wrote a prescription to help with the pain.

That was the beginning. The drugs fixed Graves in ways her baby could not.

"I realized when I took that pain medicine, everything would be fine," Graves said. "My mind wouldn't race. Or I would have courage to go out in public. I always felt like when I was out in public, people could see everything that ever happened to me. And so I could never really look the world in the eye because I wore all that pain inside. So that starts my addiction to pain pills."

She started staying out late on the weekends to use with friends, and then disappearing altogether for days at a time. Graves became pregnant again, had the baby and got divorced. She was 16 years old.

"The life that I thought I had gotten away from, I was being driven right back to. But this time, with two babies," Graves said. "And so, just to kind of cover all that fear of having my two babies in this house that I know is no good, I just drank more, I smoked more pot, I took more pills."

Her life was spinning slowly out of control - and then it picked up speed.

The city and the country

The women's prison population increased by 66 percent between 2002 and 2013, driven almost entirely by a surge in the number of white women behind bars. About 50 percent of women in prison have been convicted of non-violent offenses, according to data provided by the Alabama Sentencing Commission, compared to 25 percent for the entire prison population, which is more than 90 percent male.

The reasons for the influx of white women into prison aren't entirely clear. Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, has documented dramatic changes in the racial makeup of female prisoners across the country. He said tough sentencing for drug crimes accounts for much of the growth in the number of incarcerated women, driven by the decline of crack - which was more prevalent in inner cities - and the rise of meth and opioids in rural areas.

Incarceration is just one symptom of deeper problems affecting white women, especially those with little education who live in rural areas, Mauer said. Demographers last year noted a rare decline in life expectancy for this group, driven by a surge in deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide. Deaths among middle-aged women in small cities, towns and rural communities have risen the most, according to economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton.

Many of the same things that are killing rural American women - including mental illness and substance abuse - are also sending them to prison, Mauer said. The loss of factory and agriculture jobs have jolted Alabama communities once anchored by coal mines, lumber mills and textile plants. Jobless residents increasingly turn to drugs and crime. Rural communities are now struggling with the same problems that used to be linked to inner cities, Mauer said.

"Black communities have been hit with economic problems for the last hundred years," he said. "There may be more support from churches and within the community for people who are struggling in black communities. Some of these white communities are dealing with these problems for the first time."

The first arrest

A nighttime drive when she was 18 led to Graves' arrest on charges of marijuana possession. A judge sentenced her to probation, which included a regimen of regular drug tests. It didn't keep her clean, and Graves routinely violated the rules.

She picked up more charges - all of them minor and tied to drug abuse. Judges extended her probation, adding months of supervision to her original sentence.

Graves had another baby and overdosed on GHB, a popular party drug. Probation officers sent her to rehab, where she thrived. She made up three years of high school in 12 months and even learned American Sign Language.

When she came back to Walker County, she fell back into drugs and got pregnant again.

The volume of her despair rose to a level even the drugs couldn't muffle. When she was seven months pregnant, she tried to kill herself with a bullet to the head.

In a fluke of ballistics, she and her baby survived. The bullet missed her brain and all major vessels.

After her release from the hospital, Graves appeared in court - her head shaved, swollen and burned by gunpowder. The judge sent her to prison.

"I mean, that man's voice cracked when he sentenced me to prison," Graves said. "He didn't want to sentence me to prison, but his exact words were, 'Monica, I'm not going to wake up one day and read about you in the paper. I'm doing what I think is best for you.'"

Alabama's wild side

Walker County sits on top of the state's largest coal seam, in an area drained by the Black Warrior River. Flinty and a little wild - for decades the area attracted toughminded folk who carved communities around mines and timberlands. Criminals came too, contract killers and counterfeiters who shacked up on the fringes and created a well of local lore as deep as any mineshaft.

Recent economic problems have pushed the edges toward the center, as blue-collar neighborhoods began fraying toward poverty and lawlessness. Residents watched helplessly as the county's outlaw reputation became its reality.

Mines in Walker County laid off hundreds of workers from 2013 to 2015 - eliminating scores of middle-class jobs from an area with few alternatives. Abandoned by coal and unable to leave, some found comfort in pills and needles. Late last year, 22 people overdosed on heroin in a span of three days, a stunning number for such a small place.

Walker County has become, by some accounts, ground zero for the state's opioid epidemic. Demand for pain pills soared even before the mine layoffs, from patients crippled from backbreaking work to those looking for another kind of lift. Some of the busiest doctors flocked to the area, offering walk-in appointments and pills for cash - without much regard for how they were used or abused.

Between 2012 and 2014, Walker County had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the state.

Relieving the pain

For Graves, pills distracted her from the dysfunction of family life. Her home was so dirty as a child that the sheets were rarely washed, she said. Many relatives also abused drugs. But the abuse, both physical and sexual, extracted the greatest toll on her psyche.

All of that made her more likely to end up in prison. Wendy Williams, deputy commissioner of women's services at the Alabama Department of Corrections, said at least three-quarters of the women in prison have some history of trauma or abuse. An equally high number suffer from mental illness.

For years, Tutwiler, the main women's prison in Alabama made things worse. It was rife with abuse - described as a "toxic" environment by federal regulators who found rampant sexual and physical assault.

"Tutwiler has a history of unabated staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse and harassment," wrote Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels in a 2014 letter to then-Gov. Robert Bentley. "The women at Tutwiler universally fear for their safety,"

For decades, corrections officials had failed to protect female prisoners from cruel and unusual punishment, Samuels wrote. The prison was placed under federal supervision.

Williams said the department has addressed abuse at Tutwiler, and is working hard to change the environment to reduce stress on women inside.

"Knowing that a lot of our female population have past victimization and knowing that a lot of it had to do with past relationships," Williams said. "We don't let male staff members search female inmates."

Alone and in prison

None of those changes had happened by the time Graves arrived in 2009 for her first 18-month stretch of incarceration. Still, she found some steadiness inside, where she received treatment for depression along with a sense of order that had eluded her for most of her life.

"I come from an environment where it was dirty, there was never no clean sheets. No food. Water was getting turned off," Graves said. "So sadly to say, at Tutwiler at least I had a little stability in my life."

Graves found many women like herself inside the prison: poor, rural and addicted. Many, like her, also had children back at home. About 75 percent of women in prison in Alabama are the primary caretakers of children, compared to just 4 percent of the men, according to Jennifer Kenney, criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama.

"Women really are the fastest-growing prison population," Kenney said. "And the primary driver is the war on drugs."

Women often come in to the criminal justice system with several disadvantages. Arrested for minor roles in drug operations, they often have less information to leverage with law enforcement, Kenney said. They may also be more eager to take plea deals to protect boyfriends and husbands, and avoid fighting charges in court, which could carry the risk of a longer separation from children and family.

Even those who want to fight charges may struggle to afford private attorneys. About half of single mothers in Alabama live in poverty, the third-highest rate in the nation. Many of them live in extreme poverty - earning less than $12,000 a year for a family of four.

Danielle Bowyer, convicted of theft in Baldwin County, couldn't afford an attorney or bail. She took a blind plea in Baldwin County because she wanted to get out of jail where she had waited 10 months for trial. Her attorney told her she'd probably get probation. Instead, Bowyer wound up with a three-year sentence.

"There is a saying," Bowyer said. "You come down on vacation, you leave on probation, you return on revocation."

From crack to pain pills

Mandatory sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine devastated African-American communities in the 1980s and 1990s, and Kenney said there is data showing that African-American women still receive longer sentences for the same crimes than white women.

Still, in less than 20 years, the prison population in Alabama shifted from majority African-American to more than 70 percent white - a change driven by a sharp uptick in overall incarceration. An analysis of a female inmate roster found that rural counties with less than 100,000 residents accounted for 9 out of 10 of the counties with the highest rates of incarceration.

"In the 1980s, it was crack, crack, crack all the time," Kenney said. "When we look at the drug trends, it moved away from cocaine and toward meth."

Around 1995, law enforcement agencies began raising concerns about the spread of meth and the toxic home-based labs used to produce it. Drug rings sprang up in rural Alabama, including several in Sand Mountain, nicknamed Meth Mountain for the speed consumed in the region. Then-Alabama Attorney General Troy King also described the Wiregrass region in the southeastern part of the state as a "battleground" in the war on meth, which had "consumed" rural areas. Soon similar alarms had gone up all over the state.

Lawmakers in Alabama considered requiring prescriptions for pseudoephedrine - a cold remedy and critical ingredient in methamphetamine. When that proposal failed, they put the drugs behind the counter and created a registry. Lawmakers also passed laws that increased criminal penalties for meth users and cooks, in some cases turning misdemeanors such as possession into felonies carrying prison time.

Sheriffs and district attorneys said the laws led to a sharp decline in the number of meth labs, even as they increased drug arrests in rural Alabama. Kenney noted that the decline of meth coincided with the rise of opioids - drugs that are both more addictive and deadlier than speed. Geographic and racial differences in prescribing put many of the pills in the hands of the people most likely to develop addiction.

"Women are much more likely to abuse pain pills and white women are much more likely to be prescribed pain pills," Kenney said.

Painkillers and heroin have displaced methamphetamine as the biggest drug threat in many rural and suburban counties. Last year, lawmakers voted to increase penalties for possession of heroin and fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. It would have reversed portions of a 2015 law intended to reduce the state's prison population.

Inmates in the living quarters Monday, Feb. 6, 2017, during a tour of Julia Tutwiler Prison For Women in Wetumpka, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)Julie Bennett

Hurt or helped?

Women incarcerated for drugs may receive some treatment in prison. Graves did, but she didn't trust the lessons to keep her clean after her release. So, she ran instead of checking in with a parole officer. After six months on the run, she was captured and returned to prison for more than a year.

After that, she had community corrections and another shot at rehab. The drugs kept their pull, and Graves struggled to shed the anti-authoritarian toughness she picked up in prison. She cleaned up, then relapsed, shattering her efforts to reestablish relationships with her children.

"Prison made me mean," she said.

She developed an emotional armor to handle the horrors of prison life. Male guards would leer at women while they showered. Older inmates often preyed on newer, younger girls. Those lessons from prison seemed to be the only ones that stuck.

They didn't adapt well to life back in Walker County.

"I remember Molly standing in the yard screaming for me not to leave, you know?" Graves said.

But she did, and by 2014, she had hit bottom again. Suicidal and strung out, she lived in the woods. By then she was injecting drugs, risking overdose with every high.

She remained caught in a familiar loop of drug abuse and incarceration. The next time she got arrested, she was facing a potential life sentence due to her status as a habitual felony offender. Instead, she took drug court.

The Friday morning trip to Jasper is just one part of Walker County's drug court program. Graves calls the courthouse every day at 8 a.m. to find out whether she needs to report for a drug test. Participants must adhere to strict curfews and submit to random searches.

The program has helped, and Graves said she hasn't used in almost three years. Her oldest daughter moved in with her one year ago.

Losing an anchor

For a family, sending a mother to prison is like plucking the sun from the solar system. It often scatters children to temporary homes or foster care.

Kristy Allen, a mother from Decatur imprisoned after developing an addiction to pain pills, sent her children to live with their grandmother. Allen said she was a good mother, despite her addiction - a school volunteer and devoted caretaker. Her mother took her children during a six-month sentence, and became so gravely ill with pneumonia that she couldn't bring them to prison for visits.

The experience was so difficult for her daughters that the older one still panics whenever she sees a police car, Allen said.

Graves kept her kids close together by sending them to family and friends, but the disruption has been hard. Her kids have kept her working on her recovery. The hard feelings have softened, Graves said, and her children have become her cheerleaders.

She will graduate drug court in December and spend several more years under court supervision. This time, she's trying to do more than just avoid prison time. Graves is building a life she hopes will last.

"Now today, I have my own house," Graves said. "I have my daughter. I have a relationship with the rest of my kids. My kids love me. I have my own car. I have a life that I never ever seen in the cards for me. I have that now."

When her daughter turned 16, Graves reflected on her condition at that age - already addicted with two small babies under her care. Her daughter has witnessed everything and avoided the drugs that caught her mother. Graves was so young when her daughter was born that the two of them have grown up together, she said.

Graves has found her faith since she stopped using drugs, and she believed the cross necklace could help keep her oldest safe. Just for good measure, she wanted to add a little extra insurance.

"I'm going to have it prayed over to protect her," Graves said. "Maybe I can get her to keep it on."